"I don’t know what concept it was. Whatever the concept was that came out of his addled mind, to me, he’s just got a cob-on with someone and she’s probably shagging around, and obviously he’s set it in Berlin, where he’d probably never have been, and just gets stuck into the misery of it. I remember in an interview with Nick Kent in the NME Lou slagged it off and then changed his mind and said it was absolutely brilliant. At the time everything I played was always in the dark – and I’d tell my mum not to come out of the living room door, and I’d be upstairs and I could sense the light coming from downstairs and it would spoil my vibe. Playing that was just, “woah.” ‘Caroline Says II’, is like, “jeez…” - turning the tables on old Caroline, in a nasty way. I just loved the production. The atmosphere was so dense and the concept is just that the songs ran into each other and this gave it a sense of order. What he was singing about made me think, “hang on, am I really being allowed into this?” It was a bit weird. It’s like a psychopath’s night in, and it got me. Whenever I play that, it’s got a very German, emotive feel. And any emotional German, it’s going to be heavy emotions, bad ones. They’re not renowned for their joie de vivre. Obviously Hitler had emotions, but fuckin’ hell… So it does capture that weird European coldness. It’s weird because you don’t know if Lou really cares, he’s not exactly Sinatra or Lanza, you don’t know if he’s taking the piss. He probably thinks halfway through a song, this isn’t any good, I better sing it weirdly. “She looked like Mary Queen of Scots seemed very regal to me, just shows how wrong you can be". Pure Lou Reed that was. I couldn’t do that because I don’t do sinister. That’s someone who has a different kind of relationship – it’s not just sad, it’s weird. Big favourite with Jimmy Savile at the time, I heard."

"It was difficult to choose a Sparks record. I think Sparks are unique. Even though they’ve progressed through the early seventies ‘Visconti sound’ – it’s not glam rock, it’s something else. It’s of its time because it influenced so much of what came after it. I don’t think it was really like anything before it, but then they progressed and switched to Giorgio Moroder and those early 80s records like Angst In My Pants, and then they went Eurodisco in the nineties too. One of my favourite Sparks songs is 'When Do I Get To Sing ""My Way""'. That captures again that melancholy, it’s such a wonderful, wonderful song but wry with a sense of humour too. Lyrically I think it’s an incredible record because it was at odds with what was going around at the time. You had John Lennon doing the confessional ballad songwriting about 'this is the emotion I feel' and it’s very bare. And then you have the preposterous fantasy of prog rock. Whereas to me they approached lyrics more from the perspective of writing a film script or someone writing a novel, or even more from the Cole Porter type of lyric writing. It was based around characters and there’s extremes of emotion, like the song 'Equator' which ends the record. It’s about arranging to meet someone on a particular place on the equator at a particular time and it sets up this romantic premise, and the character gets there but the other lover isn’t waiting for him. You have this heartbreak and even though Russell is singing it in the first person, it seems to be written from a third person perspective. You have these characters created by Ron for Russell to articulate, in the way a scriptwriter would write to bring a character to life. It’s one of those records I literally wore the groove out to. Ron’s arrangements too, how he got a rock band into play how an orchestra would, but not in a pretentious way at all. The melodies are really direct and cool. It’s a real joy to listen to."

"An underrated Stones record. You know, they had a sound. They originally started off and covered the Beatles' songs and other covers, because they didn't know how to write songs. Everybody hung out in the same clubs back then and they'd see each other socially. So, early on, the Beatles gave them 'I Wanna Be Your Man', which the Beatles recorded, but the Stones did as a single. Their manager Andrew Loog Oldham told them that they had to write their own songs, so they went down and developed that sound. Then eventually they saw the Beatles doing Sgt. Pepper's and all this experimental stuff and the Stones decided to go outside of their comfort zone. That's what I find interesting, whether Satanic Majesties is the Stones trying to do Sgt. Pepper's and ripping off the Beatles or not, it has production value and songwriting that isn't found on any other Stones records. '2000 Light Years From Home', '2000 Man'; I mean, we covered '2000 Man'. It's talking about computers and the year 2000, it's so interesting. I can remember being at school in the 60s and reading 1984 by George Orwell, which is all about how in the future the government would be spying on us. Of course this was written well before 1984, which now sounds like a long time has passed. So it's all relative. With the Stones' music, the strings and backwards stuff, there is some very very good material on that record. They happen not to like the record. I think it's a unique record that shows that the Stones have some depth. There is some bad, out-of-key background singing because they were never the best singers, they didn't have harmonies like the Beatles. The thing about it is that they were blues-based and they veered away from it on that record and went into almost Celtic and classical areas. It was a pastiche, a multi-coloured quilt! You can look at a band like a coin and say, 'I see everything, I don't need to see anything more', but there is that other side. That other side is what I think is more interesting. The depth."

"I wanted to mention this record because it’s almost taken for granted in David Bowie’s canon as just ‘there’s another great Bowie track’, yet it gets overlooked by something like ‘Let’s Dance’ or ‘Heroes.’ “If this came out now I don’t think it’d have any chance on mainstream radio and I think that’s because - and this might be incredibly subjective - he does this amazing thing where he manages to be completely remote whilst leading this band. It’s a really genius performance, the way he pitches his vocal and his persona, it’s cold and remote, but yet really sexy and it’s got no earnestness in it whatsoever. It’s not inciting you to get up and rock like ‘Jailhouse Rock’ or any of the Elvis Presley records, which is someone wanting to dance with you or encouraging you to do that. “To use an obvious comparison about Bowie, this has a really alien position because the voice is so cold, but it’s perfectly Rock and Roll. And it’s really white I think, probably because I can picture him in my mind when it came out and you’d never seen anyone more white, but it’s also as low down and Rock and Roll as any of the blues records that came out. It’s interesting, it’s got that sexuality in it. “I was about ten when it was released and to me and a bunch of kids experiencing it then it was so modern, because of what Bowie’s doing on top of what is essentially a Yardbirds or a Muddy Waters riff and using ‘The Jean Genie’, which back then was such a hip kind of slang. It’s a play on Jean Genet and he’s describing bits he’d picked up from Iggy, but in the early 70s’ everything was ‘Ziggy’, ‘Iggy’, ‘Genie’ and people were called ‘Mick’ and ‘Stevie.’ “There was a very urban, street Rock and Roll that was quite illicit; the threat of drugs, danger, confused sexuality and super-androgyny and the character he’s singing about personifies that in the mind, which leads me to Iggy."